Retired General claims the White House ordered the intelligence community to skew intelligence on ISIS

  Everybody knows, including those who are attacking Donald Trump on this issue, that when the billionaire businessman called Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the “founders” of ISIS he was not speaking literally. He was not suggesting that they went to the Middle East and started up the terrorist organization or that they funded ISIS, he was implying that their policies led to the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. 

  But that did not stop the mainstream media and Donald Trump did not help himself when he was given several opportunities to clarify what he said and he refused to do so–instead doubling down. In his arrogance he could not admit he didn’t speak as clearly as he should have.

  A vastly under-reported story last week was a report which came out that found the intelligence community was tweaking its ISIS reports in order to paint a more rosy picture because Barack Obama did not want to hear the truth. This is the type of thing Donald Trump was referring to and he could have used it against the President and the former Secretary of State if he was humble enough to admit he was not being very articulate.

  Anyway, here is more on that report:

An initial report from a congressional task force studying claims that intelligence from U.S. Central Command analysts on Iraq and the Islamic State was made more optimistic before presented to the administration found that a review process was influenced by “strongly negative reactions by senior leadership to bad news being reported in intelligence.”

The joint task force to review the whistleblower allegations was a venture of the House Armed Services Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, led by Reps. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas), and Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).

“After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States Central Command’s most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command’s intelligence products to downplay the threat from ISIS in Iraq,” Pompeo said in releasing the report today. “The result: consumers of those intelligence products were provided a consistently ‘rosy’ view of U.S. operational success against ISIS.”

“That may well have resulted in putting American troops at risk as policymakers relied on this intelligence when formulating policy and allocating resources for the fight,” he added.

This issue of products “consistently more optimistic regarding the conduct of U.S. military action than that of the senior analysts,” including in other parts of the intelligence community, extended to press releases, public statements and congressional testimonies — such as a CENTCOM official declaring that the assault to take back Mosul, which still hasn’t happened, could begin in spring 2015, a statement that ISIS was “losing ground” and cornered into a “defensive position” a week before the fall of Ramadi, and the CENTCOM commander Gen. Lloyd Austin’s testimony to Congress that ISIS was in a “defensive crouch.”

  In other words the President was not interested in hearing any report which did not back up his claim that ISIS was nothing but a JV team. This sounds eerily familiar to his 2008 claim that Al-Qaeda was on the run prior to the election when in fact they were about to launch a deadly attack on the US consulate in Libya which left four Americans dead.

  It was all about forwarding a narrative back then rather than telling the American people the truth because there was an election to win and it appears as if nothing has changed. Now a former General, Anthony Tata, is claiming the order to skew the intel actually came from the top. Here is more:

A former brigadier general revealed on Fox News Monday some new information about the White House’s role in U.S. Central Command’s skewing of intelligence to downplay the threats of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

U.S. Army Brigadier Gen. Anthony Tata (Ret.) filled in some blanks on Fox News Monday afternoon, and if his allegations are true, the scandal reaches all the way to the president’s inner circle.

Tata explained that since Obama withdrew troops from Iraq, “there’s been chaos all over the Middle East.” But because the president campaigned on getting out of Iraq, he didn’t want to hear anything that countered his narrative that it was the right thing to do.

Tata revealed that a source verified to him that he was directed by an individual from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who conducts the president’s daily briefing, to stop producing “products of record” that did not fit the administration’s narrative of a defeated Al Qaeda and a non-threatening enemy in ISIS.

Tata said that the president’s briefer told this individual to call him on secure line if he had any intelligence that portrayed ISIS in a stronger light than what the president had characterized to the public, which would not leave a paper trail.

He said that this distortion of intelligence on ISIS essentially led to the U.S. ignoring the growing threat and giving the terror group two years to take root.

  Regular readers of America’s Watchtower know that in no way can I be considered a Donald Trump apologist but does not that last sentence quoted above make the point Donald Trump was trying to make? 

  But while we are on the topic of manipulating intelligence reports to promote an agenda and lying to the American people I cannot help but to look back at the Bush regime and the media outrage which ensued when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. George Bush was accused by the Democrats and the mainstream media of manipulating the intelligence report it used to invade Iraq.

  You could not turn on the television and not hear “Bush lied, people died.” You could not turn on the television and not hear the Bush regime, including Dick Cheney and Colon Powell, being called liars and war criminals and yet the mainstream media has remained curiously silent on this report.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium